Is ICANN XXX Crazy?

Vaunted and august Internet governing body ICANN seems to have its feathers in a knot over the latest TLD trying to make it to the Show as a top level domain. Avid domain speculators and adult name domain owners are watching the latest reports to determine which way the metronome is leaning. The ICANN  “relaxation” of top level domain application rules may prove too much for some online groups.

The triple X connotations are obvious to anyone over ten years old, so the ICANN group has its hands full trying to contain web possibilities, Many career domainers can’t believe the staid ICANN body  approved a commercial entity that will legitimize and focus pornography and be viewed as a negative force on line for misogyny, the rights of women, and ongoing freedom of the press issues.

ICANN isn’t completely sold on .xxx yet. The group must first conduct  due diligence  of applicant ICM’s business plan for the domain.  The ICANN board will then review the contract proposed for the operation of the .xxx domain. The issue will most probably go to ICANN’s Governmental Advisory Committee, next scheduled to meet in December in Colombia.

If ICM gets impatient they can talk to the other derby losers for the ICANN TLD apply,-pay-and-wait process. Remember those dot-kids and other domain rejections ICANN so astutely rendered judgement on? Maybe ICANN may realize they were wrong about those, too.

Triple X Adult TLD to Realize?

The triple X adult domain top level domain may be coming to the Web, industry watchers report. The domainers watching this industry quake wonder if the adult online industry, mostly composed of fee-paid video and image services related to pornography, can be a reasonable addition to Internet commerce as such. The lines are being drawn on both sides of the TLD divide.

Those watching the ICANN approval for XXX tld domains are agog after the early days of non-proliferation of web suffixes denoting non-general acceptable matter. While adult sites are a reality and a great commerce builder garnering record traffic and income in every demo, the fact remains they are not welcomed by every hosting company or router online.

Sexually explicit site masters and name owners would be expected to flock to the dot-triple-x tld. Yet the domains in existence now for adult and porn names would putatively lose value and legacy traffic. Not all webmasters are ready to give this up and conjoin their fray to a limited dot tld. Security   software makers and parental control mechanisms for computer devices would be affected.

The opposite side of the coin, the dot-kids suffix, was never approved by ICANN because it was deemed to difficult to patrol and protect. Can ICANN recover some of its lost luster as the Internet regulator? Or will ICANN critics finally have something solid to bring to bear in challenging the agency’s management and ongoing oversight of domain name and web issues? Time will tell.